Is Your Child Being Cyber-Bullied?

What is Cyberbullying?

Cyberbullying and text-message bullying is a complex thing. Other terminology used to describe cyberbullying include online social cyber-victimization, cruelty, electronic bullying, text-message bullying, and online harassment. Bullying can be defined as a form of aggression that occurs when an individual or group intimidates, excludes, harasses, or mistreats, another, directly through physical or verbal assault or indirectly through threats, insults, isolation, destruction, or theft of belongings, etc.

They say that prevalence rates of cyberbulling were greater outside of the school than inside. It was found that girls were more likely to be cyberbullied than boys. There is a substantial relation between age and gender found in relation to the effects of email bullying, and the use of instant text-messaging, which showed contrasting views between boys of different age groups.

What’s more, research on this topic reveals seven categories of cyberbullying and text-message bullying actions. These include:

• Flaming - This involves sending angry, rude, vulgar messages about a person to an online group or to that person via email or other text messaging.
• Online harassment - This includes repeatedly sending offensive messages via email or other text messaging to a person.
• Cyberstalking - This is the online harassment that includes threats of harm or is unreasonably menacing and frightening.
• Denigration (put-downs) - This involves sending untrue, harmful, or cruel statements about a person to other people or posting such stuff online.
• Masquerade  - This is when one teen is pretending to be someone else and sending or posting material that makes that person appear bad.
• Outing - This contains sending or posting material about a person that encompasses private, sensitive, or embarrassing information, including forwarding private messages or pictures.
• Exclusion - This comprises cruelly excluding someone from an online crowd.

It is clear that adults who work with school-age children and adolescents should take all forms of harassment seriously and support in the development of a society that realizes the harm associated with cyberbullying behaviors. This dilemma is so bad that 36 states have passed legislation related to bullying but only 6 of these include specific statutes associated with electronic bullying. These states include Arkansas, Idaho, Iowa, Missouri, South Carolina, and Washington.

READ Activities for Kids that do not Include Computers, Computer Games, or TV

Scientists believe that the “legal tangle” that deters this legislation involves expressing of the line between freedom of expression with First Amendment rights and the protection of the well-being of those being offended and denigrated. The emotional impact of this social problem could result in long-term psychosocial outcomes in both the cyberbully victims and the cyberbullies. With the elimination of prayer and biblical teachings from our school systems, our future leaders and societal providers of tomorrow are left without guidance of what is right and what is wrong.

There is further evidence to support how cyberbullying contributes to an impaired mental health state for those victimized and allow for cyberbullies to receive necessary attention to redirect their aggression and stop further progression of their criminal acts and behavior. It appears as though children and adolescents are practicing for later-in-life roles. Preventing development of psychosocial problems could in turn prevent cyberbully victims from mental decline and cyberbullies from becoming assertive, destructive adults.